Hal Hinson

Demolition Man is a futuristic cop picture with slightly more imagination and wit than the typical example of the slash-and-burn genre.

Disney's new full-length animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, is more than a return to classic form, it's a delightfully satisfying modern fable, a near-masterpiece that draws on the sublime traditions of the past while remaining completely in sync with the sensibility of its time.

It's a tough, intense, wrenching picture about drugs and growing up and surviving, driven by a fierce, skinless performance by its star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

The film has a message; it's another picture about finding your humanity. But in this case, it's pedaled so softly that it doesn't impose itself on you. Nothing about this movie does. And that, as much as anything, is what makes it so irresistible.

Even with these high-end artists on the team, though, the movie seems thin.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.

Most astounding, though, is the power of the film's leading actor. While Branagh's direction is forthright and articulate, his acting is brash and flamboyant.

Alan Parker's sexy, hilarious, exuberantly energetic new film, The Commitments, has so much rhythmic juice that it's nearly impossible to stay in your seat.

This We're No Angels isn't funny and it isn't smart -- it's a dumb show, almost literally, in fact. So few lines have been written for these actors that you almost believe that the script intentionally parodies their renowned inarticulateness.

A big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence.

A leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted.

The movie's sense of humor is brash and shaggy, and Rita does have a couple of fliply delivered comebacks. But on the whole, there's not enough variety or definition to hold your attention. Too much is all on the same pitch.

For about 15 seconds at the beginning, the new MGM film Once Upon a Crime is a thorough delight. Then that adorable little lion stops roaring.

What McGrath's Emma does have going for it is a breakthrough performance from Gwyneth Paltrow as the heroine.

This isn't an experience that we encounter much at the movies these days, and that's not meant as a criticism; it's high praise.

Todd Haynes's Poison is a vision of unrelenting, febrile darkness. It presents three disparate stories in three greatly varied styles, all inspired by the work of Jean Genet, and its effect, as a whole, is like that of an especially vile infection; it moves diabolically through your system, spreading fever and nausea as it goes.

This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating.

Nixon is an audacious biography rich in imagination and originality, with a provocative, often subversive sense of character and history. Dense and challenging, it is also undermined in places by Stone's obsessions just as dramatically as Richard Nixon was undermined by his.

Though it's not a great film, it is an entertaining and, at times, emotionally rich one.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention.

The movie has a big payoff; it's the setup that's the drag. But Kevin's antics will touch the budding subversive in every kid. My advice? Hide the car keys.

And you thought the Mapplethorpe show was shocking....But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least "Ladybugs" has that, if nothing else, going for it.

Nowhere was American comedy in the '40s more frivolously sophisticated than in the movies of Preston Sturges, and The Lady Eve is his most satisfying romantic film. [05 May 1988, p.C7]

This is a gassy, overbearing, pretentious little bit of art-in-your face, from the director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," and it revisits some of the filmmaker's favorite places (the men's room, for example) and favorite themes (life as consumption and elimination). Most of the film's meanings are buried inside the artist's big, intellectually high-rolling metaphors.

IQ, the new romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins, is disarming piffle—frothy, sweet and nearly irresistible.

The main problem with Patriot Games, though, is that the inevitable confrontation between Ryan and Miller takes forever to materialize. In the interim, Noyce gets bogged down in the mass of technical detail -- the inside-CIA baseball -- that is such an integral aspect of Clancy's books. On the page, Clancy's research is impressively exhaustive, and if by chance you become bored, you can always skip ahead. But a movie doesn't afford us this luxury. Some of what we're shown about the inner working of the intelligence network is fascinating, but sometimes it can become an irritating distraction. You just want to cut to the chase.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.